Wil Wheaton Particle Emitter, an Augmented Reality

Michael Zoellner took the iconic Recursive Wil Wheaton t-shirt photo and turned it into an Augmented Reality Wil Wheaton Particle Emitter. When the photo is viewed through an AR app, it begins to fire an animated stream of correctly positioned recursive Wil Wheatons, each one more particulate than the last.

You probably have heard of the Recursive Wil Wheaton t-shirt. Paul (of Paul and Storm) sent it to Wil and this photo became quite popular. It was remixed by an unknown genius into an animated gif and “won at the internet”.

Over the weekend i experimented with the new PointCloud Augmented Reality SDK (which is by the way brilliant and simple: 3D tracking and HTML5). I took Recursive Wil and turned the concept around: A Wil Wheaton Particle Emitter.

Scott Meyer from basicinstructions.net sent me the original SVG file of the shirt’s image. My first try was using Processing.js for animation (Yes! Processing.js now works in AR). But SVG and CSS 3D were the better choice to get a perspective effect. And it’s hardware accelerated on iOS.

Michael is the same dude who encoded the opening of my novel Makers to be displayed as a persistence-of-vision lightshow which was mounted to the collar of a small, high-energy dog, who proceeded to tear-ass around a park one night, spelling out the book in glowing letters.